FEW PLACES ON EARTH conjure in the Western mind images of desolation quite as much as Inner Mongolia. Even for most Chinese, the region speaks of such remoteness that, once reached, returning is not always possible.

But one man, Jiang Rong, did return. In 1967, as an officer in the Red Guard, he left Beijing for a post among the nomadic Mongols, remaining until 1978. Back in Beijing, Rong waited many years before writing Wolf Totem, his first novel, which is closely based on his experiences in the Gobi. It sold millions of copies in China and won the recently created Man Asian Literary Prize (from the same people who brought us the Booker) and has secured a record £55,000 for translation rights into English.

Wolf Totem tells the story of Chen Zhen, a man much like Rong, who is sent to Mongolia during the time of the Cultural Revolution. Once there, his role of educating the local population is quickly superseded by his own education in their ancient way of life. The focus is upon the delicate balance between the sheep-herding nomads and the wolves that prey upon the flocks.

The wolves are both hated and revered and, after adopting a wolf cub he finds abandoned in a burrow, Zhen must confront the psychological balance of killing those creatures. In their pattern of existence he discovers a greater nobility than the sheep, and those whose life it is to herd them.

Wolf Totem contains lush passages describing the war between man and beast: “more than a hundred dogs strained at their leashes and filled the air with frenzied barking, thundering through the sky...the opening salvo of a light war commenced, with beams from all sorts of flashlights sweeping the northwestern darkness. The inky-black, snow-covered ground suddenly reflected countless beams of cold light, creating a scene more awesome and more fearsome than a flash of swords slicing through the frigid air.”

The Chinese version boasted so many descriptions of Mongolian life that the English version, translated by Howard Goldblatt, is said to have been aggressively cut back from the original.

There are also, as befits the time period, tirades of political indoctrination: “The Chinese, with their weak disposition, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained (wolf) blood.”

The language and imagery in Wolf Totem can be jarringly unfamiliar. Sometimes this works to advantage, as when Rong describes the paw prints of wolf cubs: “Like plum blossoms; small, delicate, quite lovely.” Occasionally, however, it has the hollow ring of a manifesto: “Whoever takes the suicidal spirit of wolves is destined for heroism, and will be eulogized with songs and tears. Learning the wrong lesson leads to samurai fascism, but anyone who lacks the death-before-surrender spirit will always succumb to samurai fascism.” The reader is constantly reminded that this is a work of translation.

Western readers will draw comparisons with Farley Mowatt's Never Cry Wolf, or Michael Blake's Dances with Wolves, but the man-wolf relationship represents only one of many layers in this engrossing and complex novel.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Wolf Totem is that it has appeared at all. The underlying allegory - that people should cease being led about like sheep and should instead emulate the wolf's fierce independence - seems hardly in keeping with China's usual heavy-handed emphasis on conformity.

But anyone touting a new age of independence in Chinese literature is forgetting that works such as Wei Hui's Shang Hai Baby and Chung Soo-Yee's Beijing Doll are still banned in their native countries.

The publication of Wolf Totem offers a more profound significance than the notion that it might, somehow, have slipped through the grid of Chinese literary censors. Jiang Rong's novel, far from an act of rebellion, is a message to the world. The face of a new China rises from the smashed pottery of the Cultural Revolution, reinventing itself as it has done 100 times before.

Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong
Hamish Hamilton, £17.99; 544pp

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